Internet Of Things (IoT)

This last week was Davos (World Economic Form WEF 2017) time again. I’ve never attended in person, but the event it had a certain relevance for the MEMA region. Meg Whitman, our CEO, was in attendance and had interesting comments to make on the ‘4th Industrial Revolution’ which you can read about here.

However, it was also meaningful to meet up with the Saudi Ministers for Commerce and Energy to glean some insights into the Kingdom’s 2030 Vision and National Transformation Plan. For those of you not familiar with the programme, the Saudi nation has an ambitious strategy to diversify and grow their economy away from a dependency on oil revenues. Effectively, this is digital evolution at country-sized scale! But what does this really mean..?

Well… for starters it means stimulating the creation of new industries and businesses, privatization of certain public functions and the development of new jobs. But, in technology terms, this means the application of the latest innovation to creating smart cities, smart government services and linking together people and ‘things’ together at a scale never before seen. In short, the application of technology is the foundation for everything… and the Saudi plan is possibly the most extensive digital evolution anywhere on the planet today.

If you read my last blog, we discussed the importance of software-defined, Hybrid Cloud architecture, as the baseline for digital innovation.   Complimentary to creating these integrated private/public cloud capabilities, is the management of information at "the edge"; meaning everything external to the data center. The volume of data that is (and will) be created is simply vast: from manufacturing plants, to driverless cars, to retailing, to household appliances, etc, etc… As literally billions of sensors capture information, the sheer volume of data will drive the need for storage and compute to happen close to source or at ‘the edge’. Moving all that content to the data center will make not always sense, in terms of the huge network bandwidth required, and so it becomes an imperative to run many applications locally, close to the source of the information.

That ability to collect, store, analyze and report against all this new data is what the hype loosely calls ‘The Internet of Things’ (IoT).   And new ecosystems are emerging that co-join industrial engineering companies with those from the IT sector to integrate the billions of ‘things’ with the deeply analytical world of big data. Exciting times, and I find work has just taken on a completely new lease of life as my Customer conversations become more way-more business-outcome-oriented and less about the widgets. As we apply this new world of software-defined, hybrid cloud with the scale of the brave new world at the edge, I can only imagine that helping the Saudi Kingdom develop their new digital economy is going to be a fascinating journey!!

Talk soon.

 Chris